Late at night in Rio's North Zone, in front of a wall of speakers, a DJ dropped a record he'd hauled back from Miami. The year was 1989 — and by most accounts, the moment funk carioca was born. The DJ was Fernando Luiz Mattos da Matta, better known as DJ Marlboro. Miami Bass was built on heavy bass and dance-floor beats, and its fast tempo and low-end emphasis translated cleanly to favela sound-system culture. That was no accident: the wall of speakers, the MC-as-host tradition, the sweat-soaked late-night energy — all of it had been powering Rio's bailes (dances) since the 1970s soul scene, and all of it was already in place.

What Marlboro added was production. He built tracks on sampled Miami Bass breakbeats — the imported loops of the day, like DJ Battery Brain's "8 Volt Mix" (1988), which became a template for the funk beat itself — with Portuguese-language MCs from Rio's favelas over the top. One result was the compilation that made his name, Funk Brasil (1989). Within about three years of the music's arrival from Miami, the new genre had a Brazilian name (funk carioca, or simply funk) and a distinctly Brazilian rhythmic feel.

Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, funk carioca was almost entirely inaudible to the Brazilian middle class — while in the favelas it was the soundtrack of daily life. The genre's most controversial sub-genre, proibidão ("the very forbidden"), featured MCs rapping over the funk beat in explicit allegiance to one or another of Rio's organized drug-trafficking factions, with calls, slogans, and territorial claims woven into the lyric. These records circulated on CD-Rs and, eventually, on early YouTube channels; they were almost never played on commercial radio.

The period also produced funk carioca's first female stars. MC Tati Quebra-Barraco's 2004 single "Sou Feia Mas Tô Na Moda" — roughly, "I'm ugly but I'm in fashion" — combined unsparingly explicit lyrics with a swagger that put female desire openly at the center of a Brazilian funk record a decade before mainstream pop began doing the same. Tati Quebra-Barraco, Deize Tigrona, and a small group of contemporaries did for Rio funk roughly what Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown had done for New York rap a few years earlier.

The technical change of the 2010s was tempo. Producers like DJ Polyvox and DJ R7 — makers who thought only about what would land on a baile floor — pushed the standard funk carioca beat up from around 130 BPM, stripped the tamborzão (by now the genre's signature looping drum pattern) down to a simpler kick-and-snare figure, and developed a long-form mix format called the montagem, or MTG: ten- and fifteen-minute continuous productions, usually centered on a single chopped vocal phrase, designed for the sound systems of a baile rather than for radio airplay. By the late 2010s, around 2018, DJ Rennan da Penha — whose stage name points to the Penha district, though he actually emerged from Rio's Complexo da Maré (Nova Holanda) — pushed the tempo further still, cementing the 150-BPM funk that would dominate the bailes.

In parallel a more pop-leaning funk carioca was being built for the chart. MC Anitta — born Larissa de Macedo Machado, from a poor neighborhood in Honório Gurgel in Rio's North Zone — released her first hit in 2013 and within a few years had become one of Brazil's defining pop stars, later setting some of the highest streaming numbers in the country's history on Spotify. Anitta's funk is not the proibidão of the 1990s. It is funk built for a global pop audience, mixing English, Spanish, and Portuguese verses, collaborating with Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and Major Lazer, and consciously translating the tamborzão into a form that fits on a Coachella stage.

Anitta earned a Best New Artist nomination at the 65th Grammy Awards (held in 2023) on the strength of her breakout 2022 — fifty-eight years after the bossa nova of Astrud Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim was nominated in 1965, a circle of sorts coming round. The Miami Bass records DJ Marlboro had imported in 1989 had taken a full generation to make the return trip, fully rewritten in Portuguese, with a Rio favela accent. Between those two endpoints sit four generations: Marlboro's imported-loop pioneers, the proibidão MCs of the 1990s, the 150 BPM producers of the 2010s, and the pop-funk generation Anitta now headlines.

What connects them, more than tempo or instrumentation, is geography. Funk carioca remains, even in its most globalized form, a music made by the residents of Rio's favelas and, for the most part, for them — Cidade de Deus, Complexo do Alemão, Rocinha, Honório Gurgel. The sound system is still the central institution; the baile is still where a track is put to the test; the MC, even on a Bad Bunny feature, is still rapping over a beat descended from imported hip-hop — the 2 Live Crew that Marlboro reworked into Portuguese, the DJ Battery Brain "8 Volt Mix" that the genre's drums grew out of. The genre's reach has grown over thirty years. Who it is made for has not.